


the half i see

by intimatopia



Category: Persona 5
Genre: Angst, Extended Metaphors, Holding Hands, M/M, Pining, Third Semester (Persona 5)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-03
Updated: 2021-01-03
Packaged: 2021-03-13 12:47:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28528716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/intimatopia/pseuds/intimatopia
Summary: “I’m alive enough for your purposes, I suppose,” Akechi said. He sounded distant and calculating. Akira wished he had the courage to reach out and touch Akechi, to confirm his presence, and then wondered what he had to lose by doing it.
Relationships: Akechi Goro/Kurusu Akira
Comments: 9
Kudos: 100





	the half i see

**Author's Note:**

> "what are you writing" whatever the hell i want apparently

They met in front of Akechi’s apartment building. _It’s quiet,_ Akechi had said. _I’ll be back in ten minutes. You can wait that long._

Akira had gotten here an hour early.

Akechi’s apartment building was a dull, shy thing. Squat and brown, the trees outside bare with winter and the cars grey with dust. Akira waited on the pavement for ten minutes, checked his phone and found he’d only been standing there for two, and gave up.

A short walk around the neighborhood yielded poor results. There was a grocery store, a dispensary, and a post office. Akira took another round and ended up in the grocery store again. He considered texting Sojiro to ask if there was anything he should get, but it was unlikely Sojiro would reply at this time, and the man behind the counter was starting to look impatient. Instead Akira weighed his options and settled on essential-adjacent purchases; a fresh loaf of bread, a jam that wasn’t too sweet, a carton of milk. Then he went a little wild with power and also bought cereal.

His loot bagged and paid for, he stood under Akechi’s apartment building again. It was an overcast day. Maybe it would snow before the week was out. Akira wished it would snow right now just so he could be buried under the snow.

Then Akechi would have to dig him out, and he’d probably half-ass it before laughing meanly at Akira for several minutes, but at least the cold would distract Akira from everything else.

Everything else.

Over the years Akira had developed elaborate and foolproof methods of Not Thinking About Things. They did not fail him now; his mind did not wander.

Instead, he contemplated whether Akechi owned a toaster.

Akechi walked into his field of vision precisely eight minutes later. In a stroke of foresight, Akira had gripped the grocery bag with both hands, and thus did not have to waste time deciding whether he was allowed to wave to Akechi.

As Akechi came closer Akira realized he was holding a bag of his own. Not his briefcase, but an unmarked plastic bag. It appeared to contain books.

“What did you want to talk about?” Akira asked, when Akechi was within speaking distance.

Akechi did not even glance at the grocery bag. “I’ve been doing some research of my own, since your friends are so useless,” he replied, walking right past Akira without pause and heading up the stairs. 

Akira hurried behind him. “Is that what the books are?” 

In reply he got an irritated look. He ignored it, shifted on his feet while Akechi unlocked the front door and walked in, and then stared at Akechi’s shoulders.

At some point Akira had moved on from letting Akechi surprise him. As such the apartment was entirely ordinary and extraordinarily charming—there was no couch in the living room, only a table for four pushed against a wall so it only had three usable sides; the living room’s other wall was nonexistent and led directly to a kitchenette. Akechi did in fact own a toaster, and it sat prominently in the middle of the counter, which also contained a coffee machine and a single fork. The stove had only one burner. The bedroom probably existed, but Akira couldn’t spot it.

They put their bags on the table. There were round brown stains on the discolored wood. Akechi retrieved a laptop while Akira wasn’t looking, and spent a few minutes fussing with the wire.

Akira looked around the living room again, located a sliding door that was more likely to lead to a closet than a bedroom, and considered that Not Thinking About Things did not always translate to Not Feeling About Things, and he was in fact Feeling About Things right now, but he’d be damned if he could figure out _what_ those Feelings were.

Akechi snapped his fingers under Akira’s nose. “Are you here to work or gawk?”

“What work,” Akira said plaintively, childishly.

“Taking Maruki down, returning the world to its rightful state of affairs,” Akechi sneered, shrugged with one shoulder, pointed at a chair. “I can’t tolerate uselessness from you, of all people.”

In retaliation, Akira dragged the chair around and positioned it far too close to Akechi’s own.

“Juvenile idiot,” Akechi muttered.

Akira smiled angelically, then peered at the laptop. “The fuck.” What looked like architectural blueprints covered the screen, white and red against black. There were annotations in one corner, numbers in the rooms, all very professional. “Is this Maruki’s—”

“Yes,” Akechi bit out. Akira thought that if he put together all the adjectives he was having to find for the way Akechi spoke to him, he’d have enough thumbtacks to gouge out his eyes.

“Why?” Akira asked. 

“Easier like this,” Akechi ground out. “Are you going to stop asking stupid questions now?”

“Yeah, okay.”

“I don’t believe you, somehow,” Akechi sighed, typing rapidly.

Akira shrugged. “You shouldn’t make it so easy to rile you up.”

Akechi didn’t reply. He had decided to zoom in on one section of the palace and annotate it further. Akira decided to stare at the nape of Akechi’s neck, which he couldn’t actually see because of the hair that covered it. Akechi’s hair looked soft, unlike Akira’s own wiry curls.

It wasn’t easy to get a rise out of Akechi in work mode. He simply glared at Akira whenever an attempt was made and then went back to working. So Akira went along with it, pointing at sections of the screen and helping Akechi fill them out. It was, he had to admit, a useful endeavor. They marked out points where battles had taken place in yellow, highlighted surveilled areas, figured out points of entry and exit.

With a team at his back, Akira didn’t have to work like this. He relied on Futaba for navigation and their combined power to blast through anything in their way.

Akechi worked smart. He had to; he was more powerful than anyone except Akira, but he was still alone.

Still alone.

That Feeling again, nameless and awful. Like someone had taken the way he felt when Akechi spoke to him and turned it inside out and salted the raw, pulsing nerves. He wished he knew what this was supposed to feel like. He wished he knew what it was.

If he put a thumbtack in it, he’d know. He could torture an answer out of it.

Some part of him tried to drive in the insanity of torturing his own emotions, but then gave it up as futile. Which was just as well; Akira had never had an easy relationship with the entire concept of emotions.

“Are you tired already?” Akechi asked. 

Akira shook himself out of listening to the whine of the laptop’s fans. It had been fifteen minutes since either of them spoke. Maybe twenty. They’d worked so long, what light crept into the apartment was going back home for the day, inching across the table and making him think vaguely of blood, the way it flowed.

A morbid thought. He kept having those lately.

He tried to answer Akechi’s question. He couldn’t figure out where to start, what to say. He was tired. He was so tired. But nobody wanted to hear that. “No,” he said. “Are you?”

“No,” Akechi said, and he sounded like he was lying too. “But we should eat something.”

He got up and stretched. Akira heard every pop of his young bones, then got up too. Reached for the grocery bag. “I have food,” he offered.

“That’s for LeBlanc,” Akechi dismissed.

Akira opened the bag and pulled out the sugar-free jam. “They’re for you,” he corrected.

In the half-light, Akechi looked more like the silhouette of a boy than a real boy. Akira couldn’t make out his expression, but he thought it would’ve been betrayed. _Sorry,_ Akira thought. He didn’t know what he was apologizing for, and so he didn’t say it out loud.

Akechi did not have butter, so Akira toasted slices of bread carefully cut to not be either too thick or too thin, and spread the jam evenly on them. Akechi leaned against the counter and crunched his way through every slice Akira handed him, washing it down with plain milk. Akira thought about making coffee, but he was pushing his luck already. He ate after Akechi was done, two slices without jam, dipped in the milk to soften them slightly.

The laptop’s screen had gone dark. The entire room was shadows. Akira wished they hid monsters; it would’ve been easier than facing the emptiness with Akechi at his side.

He even wished he was facing Akechi himself again. At least Akira knew the role he was playing when Akechi was threatening to kill him with sweet honey in his voice, a beehive in his ribcage stinging his heart with every treacherous pulse. Acid in his nerves, coating his organs, killing him from the inside out. An invisible poison that glowed in Akechi’s eyes when they fought, pouring down his face like sweet syrup—

“Akira,” Akechi said loudly.

“Yeah,” Akira gasped. “I’m here.”

“In my apartment,” Akechi reminded him.

Akira would remember that _his_ lungs weren’t full of stinging insects in half a second. Right now he stared into the depths of his glass of plain milk. He hated plain milk. Why had he taken it? He didn’t want to finish it. He didn’t know how Akechi could stand the smell. He turned around and dumped the contents into the sink, turning the tap on to wash away the stink.

He washed his hands too. “How did you know?” he asked the running water.

“Just because your little friends have the luxury to gasp in public doesn’t mean we all do,” Akechi said, voice fraying at the edges.

 _Wasp,_ Akira thought, because it rhymed with _gasp,_ then tried to stop thinking altogether.

It helped a little, though left him again in the darkness, with Akechi at his side and a lingering tightness in his wrists and spine. But it wasn’t so bad this time. Of course Akechi knew how to make him stop panicking. Of course he knew when Akira was being pulled inside his own head and eaten alive. Akira wondered if he was allowed to know Akechi like this too. Weren’t they supposed to be even, equals, a matched pair—a lit match and a lighter?

“What did you get?”

For a moment Akira didn’t know which of them spoke. Then Akechi replied wearily, “What are you talking about?”

Akira gestured limply. “Perfect world,” he sighed. He didn’t really want to talk. “Everyone gets what they wished for. So, what do you get?”

The apartment felt like a vacuum in the aftermath of his words. This was why he didn’t like to talk. He wanted to look around and check if Akechi was still there, but he _was._ He had to be. It just _felt_ like he’d vanished, soundless and unmarked by any gravestone.

“Dead people don’t get their wishes granted,” Akechi said at last.

“You’re not dead,” Akira protested, reflexively afraid. A slight breeze swept through the apartment, rustling the plastic the loaf had come in. Akira flinched at the sound. “Are you?”

“I’m alive enough for your purposes, I suppose,” Akechi said. He sounded distant and calculating. Akira wished he had the courage to reach out and touch Akechi, to confirm his presence, and then wondered what he had to lose by doing it.

Akechi’s gloves were warm. Akira knit their fingers together and resolutely refused to look at him, even as his hand stayed limp and unresponsive in Akira’s.

“My purposes,” Akira repeated hollowly. “What does that mean?”

Akechi sighed. “What did you wish for?”

“Nothing,” Akira lied. “I have everything I want.”

“You do _now,_ ” Akechi corrected. He did not sound gentle. He did not sound harsh either, which only meant his words landed like ice chips instead of hailstones.

Akira was meant to be feeling something, right now. But his lungs had turned to stone, and his heart felt like a dying thing in his chest. Rotting already, waiting for something that’d deign to eat it. His hands and lips were numb.

_If you’re dead and I’m dead…_

“I’m not dead,” Akira tried. If he said the words out loud maybe they’d flash against the air and give away their own lie.

“No, you’re not,” Akechi agreed. “Are you going to let go of my hand?”

The streetlights came on. Akechi’s first floor apartment flooded with their glow, a sickly wasteful yellow. But it didn’t come so far in that it could touch them, only bounced endlessly off the plain surfaces and made Akechi look like a corpse.

Akira snatched his eyes away. “No.”

A full-bodied sigh. Akechi’s hand curled slowly around his, resigned to its fate. His grip was oddly soothing, almost alive enough for Akira's purposes.

“Why does it matter so much?” Akechi asked. “I was always going to die.”

“How would you feel if I was dead?” Akira asked in reply. It was the wrong thing to ask, but Akira didn’t have the right kind of questions.

Akechi shrugged. The movement lodged itself in Akira’s forearm and didn’t leave. “I would take revenge for you,” Akechi said neutrally. “But it wouldn’t matter. The only people who can kill you are you and I. And I’d be too dead to care.”

“You think you’ll die before me,” Akira realized. He was staring at their feet on the ground, side by side.

“I already have,” Akechi reminded him bitterly. “What I am now is only for your benefit.”

Akira imagined Akechi following the words up with _because you love me._ Because it _was_ love, the other word for that Feeling which was like Akechi was holding Akira’s raw and broken heart tenderly in his hands and intended to give it back. But Akechi was a consummate liar, and would not waste his breath stating something so pure and true. “You must hate that.”

“Of course I do,” Akechi snapped. “All I did, knowing I’d die, only to be yanked back into existence to convince _your_ idiotic ass that happiness isn’t the only thing that matters in the world. That we deserve to live with the choices we make—that _I_ deserve to—” he shut his mouth with an audible _click._

“I’m sorry,” Akira whispered. The Feeling hung in the air, in the useless echo of his voice, waiting for them.

“Save it,” Akechi said indifferently. “I’ll help you win, and then I’ll be gone. For good, this time.”

Akira squeezed Akechi’s hand. Akechi squeezed back, and Akira would take that for the apology it wasn’t because at least it meant Akechi was real for now, _here_ for now. His fingers against Akira’s, and all of himself that remained to be given pulsing in time with Akira’s revived heart. His stone lungs were full of thorns that grew and tangled in on themselves, unable to come out and unable to hurt anyone but each other.

**Author's Note:**

> [tumblr](https://ciaran.tumblr.com) & [twitter](https://twitter.com/_intimatopia)


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